let me lay waste to thee
by flesh and bone telephone
Summary: "They're not enough for either of us."— Men shift into wolves with the turn of the moon, and Peter Hale comes to her in phases of smoke and ash and earth soaked in blood.


**disclaimer:** i don't own teen wolf.  
**dedication:** to the poor souls reading this, i am a complete teen wolf amateur and i have absolutely no freaking idea what i'm doing.  
**warning:** seriously, i only finished watching season 2 tonight, and i totally don't know what i'm doing! i guess this could also be a lot sexier than my usual pieces, not m rated, but still. it's not even sexy enough for that, but it's definitely out of my comfort zone.  
**notes:** i feel in love with peter hale the first time i saw him, so to see lydia and peter have scenes together just made me crazy obsessed with angsty implications of a relationship. blegh just ignore me. p.s; this was all inspired by the all the feelz a youtube video on lydiaxpeter i saw the other day called 'scared i'll be torn apart by wolves' gave me, which is actually a lyric from the song 'candles' by 'daughter', which is an amazing song that everyone should do watch right now.  
**even moar notes:** i ship A LOT of ships in teen wolf, because stiles is stiles and everyone needs to want to have his babies.

* * *

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_That boy, take me away, into the night, out of the hum of the street lights and into a forest.  
I'll do whatever you say to me in the dark. Scared I'll be torn apart by a wolf  
in mask of a familiar name on a birthday card.  
Blow out all the candles, blow out all the candles  
"You're too old to be so shy," he says to me so I stay the night.  
Just a young heart confusing my mind, but we're both in silence  
Wide-eyed, both in silence  
Wide-eyed  
_.

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—

* * *

He's all coiled muscle, lying sleek over bone, sinews overlapping thinly in that way only the perfect structure of natural selection allows. Alpha, indeed.

Not a scar, not a scratch, he moves like a history without consequence, no repercussions, damn them all to hell. Sleek and prime and with all the grace of a beast's deliberation in a hunt, but with enough grace to suggest that he wears danger deeper than on his skin. That there is ash on his bones, black and charring and ready to flicker to flame once more, and a cold sharp smile that lets her now that his is the kind of scheming, survival-of-the-fittest, take all mentality that is second only to breathing.

He'll rip her apart the moment it's convenient.

And _she_'s convenient though, isn't she? A vessel rendered perfectly for his use. When his fingers curl around her jaw line, the terror bubbles into her throat, and she screams because he's a hallucination and he's far too real for an illusion. He's in her mind, and they both know he's not going out, she can't show him the door.

He's sealed tight into her skin, searing in her lungs like her own breath. Peter Hale is going to _drag_ her to hell.

The smell of scorched flesh, of bloody dirt, something old and wild, like a tree felled and rotting with moss and green. His breath unnaturally hot on the naked skin where her shirt slips over one shoulder, the sharpened tips of his fingers running over there and everywhere, Lydia ready to flinch, waiting for the moments where he sinks his nails in, teeth into her neck, hissing. Lydia, Lydia, you're a strong girl.

His claws gouge the skin behind her knees, and her breath ricochets in her throat, clanging like a misdirected bullet when he slides his knee between her thighs. The sheets tangled underneath her in a hot mess, piled beneath the small of her back. He's all cool leather, and looming heat, her hands stiff by her sides and his fingers flat wide on either side of her head. Caging her.

He looks at her, a little inquisitive, the curiosity of the detached and distantly amused.

She wonders if he's going to fuck her, because no. No, he's not real, and he's not _allowed_ here, not like this. Not _ever._

The heaving reality of all her vulnerability is overwhelming.

Her tears pool in the corner of her eyes, and she screws up her face, wants to be fierce, f_earless_, but Lydia can't keep a reign on anything when it comes to Peter Hale haunting her every _fucking_ moment. He could make her rip her own throat open, she _knows._

Her mouth curves with her long wordless, soundless scream.

Her terror only makes him smile, the specific pull of lips, faint and cold as the hardest heart. "Oh, darling," he murmurs. "I've plans for you, for us. And I'll remember you well when you get me," He raises one hand from the bedspread, and plucks at the damp strands of her hair clamped against her feverish forehead. "What I want."

He frowns a little, objectively, she thinks she'd give him a fucking brush so he can comb her hair because he obviously thinks she's some doll to do with as he pleases.

His eyes sharpen, and he's crowding in, "Ah ah," he scolds, "Don't get sassy, Lydia. You don't want me to think that your bedside manner leaves anything to be desired now, do you?" She sees a row of perfectly even teeth, with canines that are just a little bit sharper than normal. He can make them sharper she knows, fangs clicking into place, rows upon rows of jagged bone, like the mouth of a shark.

Get out, she wills, get out get out _get out._

She wishes it so hard, and so desperately her nails curve their own rips into the fabric. Her breaths come in horrible, heavy gasps. She can't live like this anymore, she can't.

"Yes, you can." Peter says, bemused by all her emotional upheaval, like he expected her to be more complacent by now. His knee digs a little, and Lydia feels nausea, bile sharp on the back of her tongue. "Only for a little while more, Lydia. You're too smart to be some porcelain figurine, I chose you, I knew you would be smarter than that, stronger than that. And you are."

The pad of his thumb traces down her cheekbone, tapping at the dampness of the tears streaking down her face like they make him a little proud, like they make her beautiful. She doesn't like the lazy stretch of pride in his smile now, no no _no_. "Lydia," he says, it rips her apart when he curves his mouth like that, thumb dipping, scraping across the slant of her cheek, to pry open her mouth. "Lydia," he purrs, cold and pleased, "You're going to get me what I want."

He moves in, and she should really just die now, she wishes he'd just get it over with and just kill her. _Kill_ her. She would rather die than feel the harsh pull of his mouth on hers, the invasive heat, his palm sliding up, coursing, _searing_ around the skin on the back of her thighs.

He could, he looks like he will, she can read it in the fall of his gaze, zeroing in, too intent to be human. The look a wolf gets before snapping the neck of its meal. Focused with primal wildness.

But Peter Hale is Peter Hale, and he's a little crueler than that, feels the heat and the youth of her body against his, but does not indulge. No, he's a mind-fuck like no other.

Peter Hale dips down and kisses her chin. A cold pressing of lips, a pressure so light it might have never been, not even in her mind.

Peter Hale vanishes.

* * *

Men shift into wolves with the turn of the moon, and Peter Hale comes to her in phases of smoke and ash and earth soaked in blood. He stalks around her thoughts with the restless paces of the same wolf, arms folded behind him in deceptive docility until he occasionally reaches out, once or twice to touch her hair, rolling strands of red between his fingers. Observing closely, as if to look for some anomaly in the pigment.

He has a face like stone, his smile chipped in faintly, only surface-worth; like whoever made him hadn't known at all really what they were doing.

He bleeds out of the dark in the moments she thinks she's most safe and blows her psyche into smithereens. He says things like Lydia, you're a strong girl, Lydia.

Nuzzling cracked, ashy lips against her throat. Clumps of earth and dust wheezing against her skin, her hair sticking to the rough grooves of his ruined flesh. You're a strong girl, Lydia. I have plans for you, plans for _us._

She's numb all over except for the scorching hiss of him against her ear, pitched low and persuasive. It's a snake's voice, a snake's words._ Lydia Martin_ is _not only beautiful_, _not only_ _incredibly_ _intelligent, but she's also immune._

Yeah, well, she has a serial killer in her head. Leading her down her stairs in her pajamas, her hand propped in his like he's some charming escort and not a man who's trying to crawl out of the grave through her.

She's the piece he uses to click all the others in place, terrorizing her in the same tender way he would lay his palm on a flower and crush it into dust. Ripping her apart, petal by petal, dismantling her until he reaches the bits that serve him best. Until he's tapped into her fear, her vulnerable rage, the insecure harrowing fear of loneliness – he plucks her up by her insides, and says she's strong.

_You're strong, Lydia._

With fear hot and tight in her chest, she might as well be rendered immobile, because Lydia has never felt so weak.

* * *

The fear is something she can push under now, in this moment, because she's awash in fury. She _imagined_ him all along, Blue-eyes and his flower, saying things like _can I kiss you? Can I hold your hand?_

With a kind of understated wit, not sarcastic or 200-words a minute like Stiles, or awkward Scott. He doesn't have any of the brutality Jackson did, when he sharpened his words _just_ so.

His eyes are blue, and his smile is a little small, sincere though. A quiet sort of kindness and goodness surrounds him, even if she really did think he was a stalker.

But then, he never was. He never had _been._

It was just another one of Peter Hale's tricks. He'd kissed her, young and wanting, and she had felt that she had needed it for such a long time, she thought she'd fly apart in brittle pieces the moment he touched her. She had wanted it for so long, _needed_ something like a hot wanting mouth, taking but giving, reminding her that she was still a pretty girl, that she was still _Lydia Martin_, and that they all still wanted her as she was the same way they did before the writing on the black board, and before she used to run through the woods naked.

And it had been simple, and nice, and she might have felt her heart falling a bit.

But mud caked under her fingernails, when she breathed it was the sweltering dark of tunnels in the earth, and when she opened her eyes there was a wreck of a human being before her. A ruin of skin so charred it barely kept together, falling in flakes to the floor like soot.

None of it had been real, _none of it._

Not Blue-eyes and his tentative, supporting smile. The ghost of a boy he'd wanted her to imagine so he could burrow further into her psyche, and now the shell, black and bleeding, dust billowing from his throat, eating her alive with his _Lydia, you're strong._

She slices her nails into her pillow case, her sobs spiraling up and out of her body till she's no better than that heaving epileptic, Erica. No better than the wrist cutters and the acid doped kids with their sorry excuses for issues, because there's a fucking _serial killer_ in her head, spread across the sheets of her bed and he _won't go away._

He asks her if she's mad, lays on his back, arms folded on his chest looking all like a dead man in a coffin if it weren't for the very undefeated cast to the dark of his eyes, and the cold razor slide of his smile.

Lydia turns on her side, clenches her eyes shut so tight she sees spots of white behind her eyelids. She wants to rip his _face_ off.

_So you _are_ mad, aren't you?_

Smugness clogs the air, and she grits her teeth, wills him away like she would some errant piece of her imagination.

And then he's _there_, digging his chin into the nook between her neck and shoulder, she feels his smile against her skin. He lays his hand over the slope of her hip. It's not lewd, or at all intimate, she thinks, it's like laying a hand over something you own, memorized within your mind, assured of the knowledge of your control over it.

His palm scorches through the cotton of her shirt nonetheless, lies hot as a coal in that same area. _You give away your heart too easily,_ he says.

It's the first time she ever touches him, of her own volition, knowing the terror that he is, slimy worms and bloodied sheets. Lydia twists her fingers around his hand, and pries his touch away. His hand is large and worn with the hard trade of murder and she flings it away from her without even looking at him, hisses out a breath and waits for some sort of retaliation.

He's told her about her birthday, made her collect the wolfs-bane, even animated her very own limbs. He's in her blood, and he has no qualms about using her body.

She'll do what he wants, there's no more need for all the psychological torture, he doesn't need to ease any further in her mind and ruin her life. He's already made his motives known, and she'll do what he wants so he can go away. Just go away.

Peter chuckles, warm and wet at her ear, doesn't force his hand back on her. But she can still feel him, she still _knows_ that he's watching the ends of her hair, splayed in curls of flame on her sheets, and he's running a finger over them. Repetitive, almost seeking to soothe, placate.

Her heart's her own, even if her mind might not be.

Peter breathes into the tangles of her hair. _Darling, I see things otherwise._

* * *

He rises. It's a phenomenon that would seem biblical if she didn't know he was Satan made flesh. Earth clings to his naked skin, and he crawls out of a hole in the floorboards, bared haunches and folds of lean sinew, he doesn't look a _thing_ like a Lazarus.

But he might as well be, because, she realizes with a shuddering hysterical sort of relief, with a wild surge of desperate hope that he's _done_ with her. He's not in her mind, breath harsh on the hairs at her nape, stalking and watching and hearing her every thought.

She's recovered with mind torn in two, but it's more than she ever expected. She'd thought she was crazy the whole time, because shit had become seriously fucked up. But here she is, everything he'd said had been true, here she is Lydia Martin raising a corpse from the dead. On her knees, manicured fingernails rattling against the floor, because when he rises he has the face of a young man, and when he smirks it fits his face the way death fits the wolf.

She's _immune_, he said.

He's an abomination, she _knows._

It's over, her eyes brim over with tears, and she wants to break out into the maddest sort of laughter, because _oh god, it's _over_. It's over, _thank_ god._

Nothing else matters, not the stains of mud on her dress, not the splinters of rotten wood snagged in her hair, not even the fact that there's a stark naked corpse breathing with skin unmarred and unbroken under a fine filming of dust.

She's _free_, now. He's going now. He won't ever bother her again. She doesn't _care_ what he's going to do after, all that matters is that he's out of her head, no longer invading the sheets of her bed, spread like vermin on territory, not whirling black around the drain of her sink.

She's _free._

Lydia goes home, takes off her clothes, steps out of her stockings and panties, lets her hair down in it's tumbling mess. Water drums on her skull, on her back and she scrubs at her skin, takes every memory off, peeling off layers of the nightmares that have been crowding her for the whole month.

Her breath puffs up in whooshes through hot steam. Fingers rubbing against her scalp, loosening the tangles in her hair and coming out clean and white and almost pure. Almost.

* * *

The sweet cloying smell of wolfs bane peppered with harsh dark earth, he lets her catch her breath. He lets her catch her bearings for a week alone before he's on her doorstep again. Ringing the doorbell like a proper gentleman.

Lydia's fingers almost slide off the doorknob in her haste to shut it. It slams on its hinges, her mom calls out concerned _Who is it dear?_

_No one,_ Lydia says shakily, twisting the dead bolt on the door. Heart booming in her ears, the stairs rush beneath her feet and she's running running _running._

She knocks her shoulder against her door frame, pain blooms against there, but she doesn't stop moving, can't slow down, stumbles still to the open window. Wrestles it shut, snaps the lock on it, and takes her steps back. Her lungs ablaze with panic, she's gotten it closed, she doesn't know why she feels that way.

She thinks he might be tittering, a window won't keep him out.

She can't stay in forever, either.

She spins around before she can knock into him, hurtling away and trying not to land flat on her ass, her knees feel like jelly and she can't for the life of her keep her hands steady.

Peter Hale is informed, calculated in all his approaches. She doesn't know what more he could possible _want_ from her. "Is that," his lips form the words, a hush of silk around her ears, all deceptive gentleness and feigned patience. "Anyway to greet a guest?"

He's immaculate, skin clean and born smooth. Not a scar on him, all streamlined kill grace, towering height and cool, unyielding smiles.

Lydia stumbles into her writing desk, jostles behind her clumsily for the pair of scissors and raises it in front of her like it's supposed to be enough.

Peter's smile gives a twitch, bemused again that she still fights him. He's handsome, face carved older than Blue eyes, colder as well. She can take nothing from him apart from the expressions he chooses to give.

She wishes that he were just a regular serial killer or murderer, because if she screamed there was hope he'd be locked up. That someone would take care of keeping him _away_ from her.

He likes that she's smart enough not to scream, he likes that she's smart enough to know he'll rip her father's throat open without hesitation.

"What," Lydia says, has to use the table behind her for support, both hands around the shoddy scissors. "_Do you want?_"

"It's regrettable that we find ourselves in these circumstances."

"You said everything would go back to normal," Lydia hisses, hates this feeling of crippling fear, she is so fucking _done_ with this. "You promised you'd leave me alone."

"Normal is a relative term, Lydia." His lips quirk faintly, "And I never promised I'd leave you alone, I didn't even use those words."

"Get _out_." Lydia grits.

He takes a step forward, and she remembers all the terrible prowling grace, the strides that seemed to eat miles. Floodlights on the playing field, his teeth dragging across her skin, lips curving around a network of veins and swallowing her pulse with the slick hot laps of his tongue.

She's frozen, she can't go any further back.

Her hands are sticky around the plastic of the scissors, and she's never wanted to scream so much in her life, a terrified cry building and building in her chest that she'll explode with if she doesn't let out.

"To answer your question," he slides closer, deliberate, calculating. Estimating the strength of her rage against the crashing roar of her fear, he can taste it on the air, makes his eyes dark with carnal knowledge of it. She couldn't hide anything from him inside her head, and that hasn't changed as much as she'd like to think it has. "I'm keeping an eye on you."

She snorts, bitterness pools in her gut. "I don't need any of that, go away. Go _away_."

But he's towering again, has inched up on her, eyes alight, almost pleased when her breath hitches in her throat. "Oh," he murmurs, "but you do."

"I don't need anything from you, get out, I swear I'll –"

"Stab me with your stationary?" He smiles, catches his bottom lip between his teeth in a poor attempt to restrain his delight. "No, Lydia. Even if you could hurt me, which you most certainly can't, you need me too much to do so. I'm your insurance the same way you're mine."

"I don't need you," she cries for perhaps the eightieth time that hour. "They told me everything, I know what's going on. I don't need anything from you. There's Scott, Stiles, they know –"

"They're not enough for either of us," Peter says, sounding stern all of a sudden. "They didn't tell you anything, not like I did. They wouldn't have ever told you anything, these friends of yours. Tell me, did anyone ever ask what was going on with you, Lydia? Did anyone even _care?_"

Lydia doesn't say anything to that. There's _nothing_ to say.

"Well, I'm informing you that there are things far bigger and more organized than the decrepit little packs this town is so used to. Things that wouldn't hesitate to slice _your_ throat open."

His shadow swarms over her, and she can catch the hot clean scent of his aftershave, the dead damp of the woods clinging to his skin. Like rolling naked in dying leaves, running naked through the dark.

"An Alpha pack," he says, nonchalantly sliding his hand around her jaw, thumb sliding across an imagined slash on her throat. Blood wells just beneath her skin, aching to be let. "They're already here."

Now that no one had told her. It's salt to the wound, nothing's changed with them, at all.

"You're not afraid, are you?" She challenges, likes the way his expression suddenly shifts, puzzled, flashing with surprise. _She_'d done that, he hadn't expected such a question.

He smiles, always fucking _smiling._ "Never." And that's when he descends, mouth slanting like a harsh rock-slide, tongue like ash. It's not kind, it's not furious, but it's a controlled, very direct expression of want. Taking at his leisure.

Lydia feels the scrape of his stubble, moans against his mouth, throws down whatever she was holding and lets him haul his palms underneath her skirt, hot worn skin towing her hips up and knocking her back onto her table.

Her desk lamp clutters to the floor, she lets him slip a knee between her legs, lets him devour the exhalations from her lips. Place hot searing licks of mouth at the hollow in her throat. Claws elongating and scouring the delicate skin on the back of her knees.

She tugs her fingers through his hair, wants it disorderly, wants some sort of _break_ in the perfectly patterned structures of this man. Wants so badly to _undo_ him. He murmurs her name against her ear, clutches at her hair, rolling fine strands of red over his fingers over and over and over and _over -_

Peter hisses, a harsh pull of air between his clenched teeth and pulls away. Lydia clambers off the table, skirt hiked on her thighs and takes to the corner of the room, breath tremulous in her chest.

"Lydia, darling," he whines, patronizing. The lacerations on his shoulders sizzle beneath his shirt where she's slipped her nails in and dug as far as she could go. Wolfsbane, she was too smart not to have some of the powder lying around. "That wasn't very polite."

"No," she shakes, "It wasn't."

"It stings."

"It's meant to do more than that."

He grins, not a rehearsed pull of a smile, or the long draw of a smirk – but an actual _grin_, it hollows her stomach out. It sparks up a disastrous sort of light in his eyes, and he's proud again, proud and wanting a little less tame than before.

"You don't get to fuck me," Lydia growls, clumps of powdery purple still caught in her clenched fist. "You don't _get_ to touch me."

"I suppose I don't get to hold your hand, either?" He says, and it's a knife slipping hard between her ribs. Because Blue eyes had never been real. But this monster's eyes are blue, shine with a light meant to lure and destroy, mind razor sharp and thought drawn into himself, undecipherable to others. How _dare_ he?

"Get out," Lydia hisses.

For a moment he looks like he might take her on her bluff, looks like he wants the fight in her, wants to play and tousle and let her try to rip him apart. But Peter Hale brushes back his hair, gives her face a long very intent look that is not so much lewd but terrifying in its ability to make her hyper-aware that she's just a girl with a man much stronger than her all alone in her bedroom.

"I'll take care of you, Lydia." He promises, tipping his head to her before he leaves her room. Taking the door like he's going to leave through the main entrance. "You're immune, remember? That's nothing to turn your nose at."

He closes the door quick enough behind him, desk lamp shattering in an explosion of glass.

Peter Hale takes the stairs, makes sure to smile politely at Mrs. Martin when he lets himself out.

* * *

—

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.

.

_Cause we both know I'll never be your lover. I only bring the heat.  
Company under cover, filling space in your sheets.  
Well, I'll never be a lover, I only bring the heat.  
Company under cover, filling space in your sheets,  
in your sheets.  
_.

.

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* * *

**end notes: **so i tried. um, review, plz?**  
**


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